Two shows

I wanted to highlight two shows that are in the Fondren area right now.  They have been up for the month of April and will be coming down soon.  Currently at the Cedars, which is a community center and part time gallery run by the Fondren Renaissance Foundation, is an exhibition that I am part of.  Exhibiting with me are two long time friends David West, and Ky Johnston.  David teaches drawing at Belhaven University, and Ky teaches pottery at Delta State University.  Also in the show is the collaborative glass work of Elizabeth Robinson and Kay Holloway (Spirit House Glass), and ceramic work by Courtney Peters who owns the Fondren interior design retail store Mosaic Interiors.  It is an incredibly diverse show with pottery, printmaking, drawing, painting, and glass work, but it all comes together nicely.  The spots of bright color contrasts well with the frequent black and white graphic pieces.  

Just down the street is a show at Fischer Galleries with photography by Gretchen Haien, and paintings by Vicksburg resident Martha Ferris.  Gretchen teaches photography at Belhaven University with David West, and this series of "Incidentals" showcases her ability to combine quiet, meditative, and minimalistic images with her vast technical knowledge.  Martha's series of European architecture inspired pieces are some of my favorite things I have seen in the area in the past couple of years.  She had a show of work from the same series last year at Fischer.  The flat shapes of color and play with perspective have a nice connection to her recent mosaic and tile work.  There is a particularly strong connection with the fountain mosaics she did at the Mississippi Museum of Art.  They are beautiful, playful, and very well executed which to me makes them very strong.  

 Pottery by Ky Johnston and painting by Jerrod Partridge (me)

 Mixed media piece by David West

 Main room at the Cedars

 Glass work by Spirit House Glass

 "Incidentals 041.10" by Gretchen Haien

 "Berlin" by Martha Ferris

 "Italy" by Martha Ferris

Dinners a l'art

Back in May I had the privilege of participating in a fundraiser for the Mississippi Museum of Art.  Fellow Jackson artist William Goodman and I collaborated at one of the dinners titled "Dinners a l'art" put on by the Board of Trustees at Gallery 119 in downtown Jackson.  I wrote an article about our experience for Number: an independent arts journal published for the tri-state region of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee.  On their website you get a pdf of the publication, and you can become a member to support the non-profit Number:inc and receive the journal in print quarterly.  The summer issue, No. 72 has a collaboration theme.  Below you can see the pieces William and I created together.

 

"Dinner Star"

Mixed Media on handmade paper

 

 

"Take out"

Mixed Media on panel

 

William Goodman and me (Jerrod Partridge)

Courtesy Mississippi Museum of Art

 

Arts and Crafts... what's the difference?

There is a remarkable show of quilts hanging right now at the Mississippi Craft Center in Ridgeland by the late Gwendolyn Magee.  I was only vaguely familiar with her work prior to visiting the show recently, and I never had the opportunity to meet her before she passed away last year.  I was primarily familiar with her work in the permanent collection at the Mississippi Museum of Art.  Her work often attacks images of race and injustice head-on like a visual steam train of which you cannot get out of the way.  Narratives of slaves with bloody slashes on their backs, one pooring arsenic in her master's supper, a man hiding in the shadows of his home defending it from those burning a cross on his lawn,  even the death around the New Orleans Superdome after hurricane Katrina.  She successfully avoids being trite and sentimental in her narratives.  The amazingly beautiful craftsmanship of the quilting juxtaposed with the hard core imagery is as powerful as any art should expect to be.  

Fortunately she gives us some relief from the emotionally charged narrative work and produces more traditional patchwork quilts as well, with a superb delicacy and uniqueness.  However, it was the narratives that lingered with me.  They are not images you might expect to come across in an environment like a craft center. So it got my mind to wondering, what is a craft?  Gwen's work hangs in both the Art museum, and the Craft center, so is there a difference?  Is there a fine line, a fuzzy line, or no line at all?  

I began the search for an answer by trying to figure out what the Craftsmen's Guild of MS uses as a criteria for acceptance.  It seems pretty open ended.  Primarily the work has to be three dimensional, hand made, and show a level of mastery of the material.  Apparently there was a little question at first about Roy Adkins' mixed media pieces.  Roy is a local photographer and the pieces look like work you would find in a typical art gallery, but when he explained that in his work pieces of canvas were sewn together then his energetic pieces were fully embraced and welcomed into the fold.  

I soon realized that the Craftsmen's Guild and the Craft Center were not trying to define what a craft is or isn't, they are just trying to define the culture of their own organization.  Dictionary.com says that a craft is "an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill".  Art itself can hardly be defined at all other than something created by a human being wherein if he calls it art it must be (sorry, what the elephants do isn't art).  Most art requires some sort of craftsmanship, though not all.  Stretching a canvas, sizing it, priming it, even painting it is all craft.  

So my answer is no, there is no difference between art and craft.  Some work rises to the level of fine art, some doesn't. There has to be a difference in quality of art, but that is a whole other discussion.  Art is wonderfully undefinable and will always continue to challenge, excite, entertain, and fulfill us as long as there are living breathing people on this Earth with the God-given gift of creativity.

 Gwen Magee

"86 Lashes to Go"

Gwen Magee

"Full of the Faith"

Gwen Magee

"Over a Way That with Tears Has Been Watered"

Gwen Magee

"Yassa Massa, Yo Dinner Won't Neva Be Late No Mo!"

Gwen Magee

"Jewel Fire"

Gwen Magee

"Not Tonight"

Roy Adkins

Roy Adkins

Vogel Collection at the MS Museum of Art

There is an amazing story on display at the MS Museum of Art right now.  I say that because the story of the Herb and Dorothy Vogel collection is just as grand as the collection itself.  This couple of moderate means (he was a postal worker and she a librarian) began collecting art after they were married in 1962, and slowly and methodically began to fill their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with art.  They built up a collection of around 4,000 pieces over the years and recently donated the work to the National Gallery in Washington D.C.  In a documentary playing at the exhibition, Dorothy said that with the two of them being civil servants felt that they were merely "caretakers" of the work and donating it the National Gallery was their way of giving it back to the people of the United States.  The National Gallery was only able to take about 1000 pieces so a program was set up to distribute the work throughout the country.  It is called 50 Works for 50 States and the MS Museum of Art is the recipient of 50 pieces for their permanent collection.


The approach they took to collecting art is nothing short of remarkable.  In the documentary they were described as eccentric, compulsive, and obsessive.  The collection became a concept in and of itself.  Nothing was ever sold.  Their apartment was filled to the ceiling (with some work hanging from the ceiling).  They bought work because they believed in the artist as much as they appreciated the work itself, so many artists were represented thoroughly in the collection.  One person that stands out as being well represented in the selection given to the MS Museum of Art is the artist Richard Tuttle.  Here is where some people may have difficulty in appreciating the collection.  Tuttle was an early Minimalist artist of the '60s. His work is often very minimal.  In the documentary, Herb mentions that when they began collecting work that Pop art was the prominent New York style, but Minimalism was new, experimental, and vanguard.  In other words it was much more reasonably priced and therefore the collection has a large number of Minimalist pieces.  In an interview with Charlie Rose, the Vogels were asked what a particular Tuttle piece "signifies", and their response was "it doesn't have to signify anything, it's a visual thing".  If you do have difficulty appreciating Minimalist art, keep in mind what Becky Hendrick says in her book Getting It; that "there are only two requirements for appreciating art: we need to look at art objectively and without prejudice; and we need enough information about art's relationship to history and culture to support our non-judgemental explorations."


According to the book After Modern Art 1945-2000, by David Hopkins, the term Minimalism was rejected by many of the early practitioners.  Donald Judd, one of the primary artists of this movement is said to have felt that the term connoted a reductionist view, as though they were "attempting to reach an essential core."  He felt that one shouldn't focus on what was missing from the work when "works such as his were kept uncomplicated precisely in order to isolate specific and positive qualities."


The collection isn't all Minimalist, though.  There are some wonderful ink drawings by Mark Kostabi that have a more illustrational approach, and an expressionistic ink drawing by Michael Lash.  There are a couple of very busy, graphic, mostly abstract with some cartoonish elements graphite drawings by Joseph Nechvatal that contrast nicely with the Minimalist work.  In fact, a majority of the collection is drawings, but one of my favorite pieces is a Takashi Murakami object.  It is wild and beautiful, and represents a broadening of the collection away from drawing and away from the New York focus.


So, please go with an open mind and enjoy the story.